Today's Features
AUDIT & ASSURANCE

Why Audit Walkthroughs Break Down (and What It’s Really Costing You)

Why one of the most critical audit procedures quietly becomes one of the least effective

By William Englehaupt

Walkthroughs sit at the center of audit quality. They are the mechanism through which auditors develop an understanding of processes, identify control points, and assess risk in context. Yet in practice, they are frequently one of the least controlled and most inefficient parts of the engagement.

They tend to run late, produce incomplete evidence, and generate follow-up cycles that extend months beyond the initial meeting. By the time year-end arrives, teams are often still resolving questions that should have been addressed months earlier. This is not a failure of technical capability; it is a failure of process design.

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Most audit teams do not manage walkthroughs as a defined system of work. Instead, they are treated as a sequence of meetings—scheduled, conducted, and documented with varying degrees of rigor. That approach creates the appearance of progress without delivering the underlying objective: a complete, evidence-based understanding of the transaction flow from initiation through financial statement impact.

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MARKETING & SALES

Your Website Makes Promises. Do You Deliver?

Man viewing desktop computer screen

You only get one chance at that first impression.

By Martin Bissett
Business Development on a Budget

There’s an overall sameness to the majority of accounting firm websites, and typically they make a lot of promises – promises like

  • we’re big enough to cope and small enough to care, or
  • we are proactive, or
  • we’re not just bean counters, or
  • we have your best interests at heart, or
  • your business is our business.

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You’ve seen all those, haven’t you? Are these or similar promises on your website?
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LEADERSHIP

Randy Crabtree: What if Vulnerability’s What Leaders Need Most? | MOVE Like This

When leaders admit they don’t have all the answers, they create room for others to contribute.

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MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

Randy Crabtree founded an accounting firm, then came to a difficult realization: Being its founder didn’t make him the right person to lead it. His decision to step aside as managing partner of Tri-Merit opens a bigger conversation about what happens when leaders admit they don’t have all the answers.

On MOVE Like This, Crabtree joins host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to explore how vulnerability can build trust, help people find roles that fit their strengths, and give teams the confidence to try something new. Now retired from Tri-Merit and focused on speaking, advising, and The Unique CPA podcast, he challenges a leadership model that asks people to appear invulnerable while carrying more than they can sustain.

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Crabtree’s perspective on vulnerability is deeply personal. Twelve years ago, he suffered a stroke. While his physical recovery was relatively quick, the mental recovery took years as he dealt with panic attacks, PTSD, and depression. That experience forced him to acknowledge something leaders are often conditioned to resist: he couldn’t do everything himself. It also prompted him to question other things he had long accepted as true about work and leadership, including the idea that leaders always need to have the answers, hide weakness, and prove their value by how much they can carry.

That questioning eventually led Crabtree to one of the most difficult decisions of his career.

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PODCAST

Logan Graf: Build a Modern Accounting Business, Not a Job | The Disruptors

“People don’t want to work themselves to death for a third of the year.”

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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

The Break-Through Blueprint for Revolutionizing the CPA Firm Business Model

Logan Graf, owner of The Graf Tax Co and founder of the Counter community, is proof that there’s a better way to run a tax firm. Last tax season, after restructuring, hiring a manager, and implementing a tax scheduling system, neither he nor his manager worked more than 40 hours a week. He believes accounting firms should operate like modern businesses. “We don’t have to look at what’s been done in the past and copy them,” he says.

Graf, who launched his own firm in 2020, took mental notes of what he liked and what he didn’t like at the firms he worked at. At his last place of employment, Scott & Aderholt near Austin, TX, he was given an unusual level of autonomy. “I was basically running a firm within a firm,” he recalls.

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In addition to technical work, he also handled client onboarding, return preparation, review, billing, workflow design, and documentation, all of which made going out on his own easier. “It was like a seamless transition,” he says. The extra money as a firm owner was a welcome surprise. “I was basically making double the amount of money and working the same amount of hours, if not less,” compared to his prior jobs.

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